FEWER Jamaican children were reported missing during the time the island experienced the worst of the novel coronavirus pandemic between 2020 and 2021, but the numbers still make for grim reading.

According to figures released on Friday, 893 children were reported missing last year, the lowest in the past five years. In 2020 when the island recorded its first case of COVID-19, the number of children reported missing was 1,066, which was also lower than the three preceding years.

The data show that there were 1,674 missing children in 2017, 1,510 in 2018, and 1,543 in 2019, before the sharp decline in 2020.

As usual, the majority of children reported missing in the five-year period, 2017-2021 (79 per cent), were girls.

The data summary was analysed during the singing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) among partner agencies to the Ananda Alert System, including the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) and the Ministry of Education and Youth, at the Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel in Kingston on Friday.

Addressing the signing ceremony, chief executive officer of the CPFSA, Rosalee Gage-Grey pointed out that there was a relatively steady recovery rate of missing chilldren (85 per cent).

But Gage-Grey noted that the number of children going missing in Jamaica remains a great cause for concern as one child in this situation is one too many.

“There are many factors contributing to children going missing, and our efforts to address the root causes must be strengthened. We embrace the partnership of every organisation represented here today. The MOU signing is another major step in furtherance of our mandate to safeguard the well-being of our nation’s children. This new Ananda Alert MOU is a more robust work plan, providing a comprehensive framework for collaborations towards our main goals,” said Gage-Grey.

Under the new MOU, which follows one signed in 2013, stakeholders have agreed to work together to safeguard children while improving the efficiency of the response mechanism and services offered to missing children and their families.

Expressing that the memorandum is more than a signing of a document, founder of children’s advocacy organisation Hear The Children’s Cry, Betty Ann Blaine said, “To my mind, it’s a memorandum of commitment that we will do everything we can to combat the problem of missing and abducted children, and to labour unceasingly to keep them safe.”

In the meantime, Annadjae Roberts, Ananda alert officer at the CPFSA, told the Jamaica Observer that there are still challenges in the use of the Ananda Alert system.

“A major challenge is parents waiting 24 hours; they are still watching… and that has implications on some of the avenues we can use, particularly the Facebook partnership which has to be utilised within 24 hours. In investigations, those first 24 to 48 hours are key. The child wouldn’t have gotten as far so we need to get the police looking into the case at that point,” said Roberts.

“When the case is to be closed we have to verify that this is the child that was reported missing and that they are safe, but we are seeing parents not taking those children back to the station so we can’t formally close those cases. We need parents to let us know that their child has returned home or they have found their child,” added Roberts.

According to the data, 5,106 of 6,686 missing children during those periods were located, with 1,580 still unaccounted for.

Last year one missing child was found dead, a decline from six in 2020, five in 2019, five in 2018 and three in 2017.

Narrowing the statistics for last year, the agencies noted that St Catherine consistently records the highest number of missing children reports with 24.1 per cent, followed by Kingston and St Andrew with 18.4 per cent.

Additionally, older children are significantly more likely to go missing than younger children. Data show that 56.9 per cent of the children who were reported missing were in the 15–17 age group, followed by 37.1 per cent in the 12–14 age group.